The Grounds of Sense: Kant's Image of Theoretical Finitude

Abstract

I examine the centrality of theoretical finitude—the dependence of our knowledge on what is given—to Kant’s ‘problem of pure reason’ and its solution in the Critique of Pure Reason. I argue that what generates the problem is reflection upon empirical judgment, the paradigmatic act of finite knowledge. And I argue that, though the solution’s method assumes the form of an investigation not, in the first instance, of the empirically given itself but of the capacity by which we know it, nonetheless even here givenness, and thus finitude, persists in our reflective relation to the forms of our sensibility, space and time. These forms are given forms because they do not, according to Kant, belong to finite knowledge just as such: they are peculiarities of human knowledge. And this given character of our sensibility has, I urge, deeper import than is generally appreciated. It determines the shape of critical reflection as expressed by the expository structure of the Transcendental Analytic and thereby plays an essential role in the explanation, not just of the objective validity of the fundamental concepts of the human understanding in their application to the spatiotemporal, but of why these concepts are what they are in the first place. These concepts, such traditional ontological concepts as reality and negation, substance and cause, stand in an essential unity with space and time as per se expressive of the condition, traditionally called ‘nature’, under which alone the spatiotemporal is intelligible.